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Keeper of the Flame Keeps Boxing With the Memories

Cold weather is coming eventually, so I’m in the process of moving summer things down to the shelves and wardrobes in our basement. It’s hard, however, to find proper storage space given all those boxes, which have been there since we moved here in 2011.

Many of those boxes, still unpacked collections of my stuff, I already wrote about in an earlier column. I’m now talking about those other boxes, the ones that are even more pathetic. They’re filled with stuff that belonged to my late parents, stuff for some reason I could not part with when I cleaned out their home in Denver 16 years ago — the spoils of an only child.

Let’s go back for a moment to the scene of the crime. I grew up in Denver. My father passed away in the fall of 1984. My mother passed away in the spring of 2001. What’s nearly as bad as losing your parents is gaining all their possessions. My wife and I left our home in South Natick, and took up residence for a week in that emptiest of nests 2,000 miles away. We rolled up our sleeves, dug through all the closets and drawers, sold large items no extended family member wanted, gave away mementoes to neighbors and friends, took 16 Hefty bags of clothing and bedding to Good Will and tossed out untold containers of trash.

We then boxed what we thought were a few things, earmarked: SEND TO OUR HOUSE, DEAL WITH LATER. A mind is a terrible thing to make up. Who knows? We may want some of this leftover stuff or think of someone who might. By “stuff” I mean that which has no real value other than the sentimental kind. Who knows, maybe I can use that tennis racquet we got with S&H Green Stamps when I was 12. Maybe I can hang it on a wall and call it art.

SEND TO OUR HOUSE was easily yet expensively accomplished. DEAL WITH LATER is a joke. These boxes not only sat in our South Natick basement for nearly 10 years, but also made the trip to the Vineyard where they took up residence in our new basement.

I know I am not alone in holding onto family relics, but why do we do this? When my wife and I are gone, who is going to want this stuff? We have no children, and even if we did, why burden them? By the way, I share my past and basement with my wife’s parents’ legacy. But since she has eight siblings, her stash is smaller than mine.

None of this memorabilia has a capital M. It’s family detritus: out-of-fashion tablecloths, a case of what my mother called cordial glasses, questionable artwork, a stack of breakable 78rpm records, photo albums, slides, slide screen, slide projector! Yikes! It’s like having a high-school version of “Antiques Roadshow” in my basement.

But to throw all this out would be like erasing my parents and erasing where I came from. There’s something primal here. By holding on to what belonged to my parents, I am truly holding on to what’s tangibly left to remind me of them. These boxes are indeed proof of my past.

I don’t really need that photo of my family having dinner in a Havana restaurant before Castro began clearing the tables. Or an artist’s rendering of me in full bar mitzvah regalia. Or slides of a wedding where no one’s recognizable. Or a silent home movie clip of my father instructing a gawky me to get in the driver’s seat of his car for a lesson while my mother stands off to the side biting a nail.

But when I see them, I smile or even stifle a laugh, and slide back into a Proustian reverie of — to co-opt an expression — the way we were. Even the color photos have that cast of black and white. It’s like dreaming my way through an unintentional archive, a mini Smithsonian of memories. Our basement has become a shrine to lives lived.

So, yes, every once in a while, without fear of Pandora (the Greek myth, not the music app), I will open a box and stare at a random harvest of photos, knowing they’ll soon be doomed to a future of anonymity — photos like the kind displayed in shops that sell frames.

Without this encumbrance there would be an incredible lightness of being, but there would also be a sad emptiness. I don’t have the heart to discard it all. It would be like an amputation. Keeping stuff is somehow embedded in our genetic codes. Why did my mother keep my old tennis racquet? Did she really think I’d come back for it?

To prove we existed, I guess we must leave flotsam in our wakes. Maybe next weekend I’ll bring my wife to the basement, take out two cordial glasses, pour some Port and toast the “was” that still is.

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.

You are not alone! A winter activity might be a series of show & tell evenings with friends ... videographer included. Maybe then you could part with the stuff & still have the record of your past...or is it the basement hiding place that makes it all so precious?

Sweet, Arnie. But I wonder if I - a devout tosser - feel fuller than you who seems to suffer from emptiness when disposing of memorabilia. To the contrary, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from me when I throw things away. And in any event, my memory is so rapidly fading . I fear I wouldn't now recognize half of what I might have saved.

Just took thousands of slides to the dump along with the slide projector (which did not accommodate the slide boxes anyway). But - kept the many hours of 16mm movies, had the movie projector repaired, and hope to enjoy many MV laughs dating back to my father swimming at the OB 'bathing beach' in the 1920's. After that ...

Arnie, Funny stuff. When I first got my own 1/2 acre in the 70s I was so excited to be able to have a place to store all "the stuff" I could get free from the dump. I got married, had kids and was soon told by my wife to "get rid of all that crap". Paying to bring "the stuff" back to the dump, they had changed the rules over the years, sure taught me a lesson.

I saved Richie’s swimming trophies and moved them 3 times. Finaly told him he needed to take them. He got them out of the attic, looked at each one, took out his phone and took one picture of the group and then gave ME permission to dump them!
Being the socially concious person that I am, I decided to search for a way to recycle them. Called trophy stores, recycling centers, etc, no takers. Tried to take them apart and recycle the metal, marble separately. Finally filled up the recycle bin the city of Newton gives to each resident and placed it on the curb for recycling day. Whew! Richie was fine with just a photo, I was physically and emotionally drained!

When my mother died in 1992 I moved boxes of her photos and books and letters etc. to my house four blocks away, with plans to sort through them eventually of course. A few years ago I moved back to my mother's house, my childhood home, and you guessed it, those boxes are now back here and I have yet to sort through them and it's now been 25 years. A delicate process. On one hand I would like to toss the 20 or so boxes of books that I couldn't care less about, but on the other hand I want my children and grandchildren to understand that we come from books and from learning and I want them to be able to hold a piece of their ancestor's history in their hands. I would like to not leave so much stuff for my children to have to sort through but I'm afraid it's a losing battle. With apologies,Mom.

It's something like finding "Desiderata" for the first time,Arnie. You copy it, hang it on your bedroom wall, and tell all your friends. Later, perhaps much later, you discover it isn't a thousand years old. Heck, it isn't even a hundred.
But a good read nonetheless. I say keep everything!